Highly religious people should be more willing to say goodbye to the material world, right? It turns out that devout believers cling ferociously to Earthly life. That’s the finding of a new study reported by the Center for Inquiry:

[T]erminal cancer patients who reported drawing comfort from religion were significantly more likely to demand heroic care during their final week of life than those less attached to faith. Strong believers were also significantly less likely to engage in advance-care planning activities like making a living will, signing a do-not-resuscitate order, or naming a health-care proxy.

The difference between religious and non-religious was not trivial:

Only 3.6 percent of the least religious received mechanical ventilation during the final week of life, compared to 11.3 percent of the most religious.

Did you ever wake up suddenly because while you were having a dream because your body actually moved a bit? This poor dog was apparently having a running dream when his body kicked in . . . such a rude awakening!

What protects us from physically acting out our dreams and hurting ourselves? The body functions to paralyze itself during REM sleep to protect us from self-damage that would occur if we acted out scenes from our dreams.

Where do American non-believers live? On the West Coast, of course. Based on new data, however, even greater percentages of them live in New England. Here’s the interactive American map. Here’s an excerpt from the article by the LAT:

Since 1990, the percentage of Americans claiming no religion has nearly doubled, growing to 15% last year. That was the overall conclusion. But tucked inside the report are figures offering portraits of various regions.

Nonbelievers, skeptics and the unaffiliated are clustered in New England and along the Pacific, even as all 48 states surveyed have become less religious, the American Religious Identification Survey found.